This invention relates to a machine translation system for automatic translation of the Japanese language into a certain other language.
With recent developments in computers and communication technology, international information exchanges have become fast and voluminous. Because various economic activities are performed worldwide these days, the significance of international communication is therefore increasing.
Under these circumstances, the development of systems for automatically effecting translation between Japanese and English with computers is desirable, and various machine translation systems have been developed.
Conventionally, the development of transfer systems in which the compositions of original sentences are analyzed on the basis of a context-free grammar, a context-senitive grammar or the like is the mainstream approach to machine translation from Japanese into English.
Ordinarily, in conventional machine translation systems, the syntax of the source sentence is analyzed based on a context-free grammar and case relationships, as previously mentioned. In this process, however, syntactic writing analysis rules are required for each of the different writing styles, and different rules are required even for sentences having the same meaning but different word orders. The number of necessary syntactic analysis rules is therefore innumerably large.
In practice, it is impossible to provide innumerable syntactic analysis rules for all possible styles. For this reason, in actual translation processes, syntactic analysis or the like is performed after the original sentences have been transformed by pre-editing. Thus, the conventional systems necessitate laborious operations including pre-editing before translation and are therefore disadvantageous in terms of efficiency.